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Charles H. Bennett is an IBM Fellow at IBM Research. Bennett's recent work at IBM has concentrated on a re-examination of the physical basis of information, applying quantum physics to the problems surrounding information exchange. He has played a major role in elucidating the interconnections between physics and information, particularly in the realm of quantum computation, but also in cellular automata and reversible computing. He discovered, with Gilles Brassard, the concept of quantum cryptography and is one of the founding fathers of modern quantum information theory. Bennett is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the 2008 Harvey Prize by the Technion and the 2006 Rank Prize in opto-electronics.

What is it that increases during self-organization, and why?

We show how information theory and computational complexity can be used to quantify, in an objective and system-independent way, that which increases when a physical system undergoes self-organization. A harder problem is to identify the physical conditions which allow or cause self-organization. We discuss the role of thermodynamic disequilibrium in enabling some physical systems to accumulate and retain, in their present structure, redundant evidence of a nontrivial causal history.